Apple TV's 3-Season 'Lost Meets Fallout' Sci-Fi Series Succeeds In Its Hardest Task

While Apple TV’s blend of Lost and Fallout was already successful before its third season recently began, the sci-fi series has now managed to outdo itself by pulling off a rare TV achievement. Although the classic ‘90s series Twin Peaks was one of the earliest shows to experiment with the narrative style and the sci-fi procedural series The X-Files then expanded on these efforts, 2004’s ABC hit Lost still remains the definitive example of the Mystery Box writing style in action.

A colossal success that drip fed clues to viewers with each new episode, promising an increasingly complex, byzantine plot that would pay off for anyone who was paying close attention, Lost changed the way that viewers engaged with serialized TV. In the years since, everything from Netflix’s hit Stranger Things to Yellowjackets to Severance to Prime Video’s post-apocalyptic video game adaptation Fallout has borrowed from this approach, constructing their plot as a mystery to be solved by canny fans.

One of the most triumphant examples of this trend comes in the form of MGM+’s trippy horror masterpiece From, which stars former Lost hero Harold Perrineau as a stranded everyman trying to make sense of a nightmarish small town. However, the sci-fi genre isn’t short on stellar mystery box shows either. In particular, Apple TV’s Hugh Howey adaptation Silo, which debuted in 2023, has managed the considerable feat of keeping its mystery box story more engaging than frustrating over the course of three seasons.

Silo’s Mystery Box Plotting Still Hasn’t Gotten Old In Season 3

Set in a dystopian future where 10,000 people live in the titular underground silo divided into 144 floors, Silo is adapted from Howey’s trilogy of novels Wool, Shift, and Dust. Showrunner Graham Yost, previously best known for the neo-Western Justified, initially centers the show’s story on Rebecca Ferguson’s Juliette, an engineer who becomes suspicious while working on the eponymous Silo’s lowest levels.

Although the story swiftly expands to include Rashida Jones’ IT worker Allison and her husband Holston, the Silo’s sheriff, the sheer breadth of Silo’s ambitious plot only expands with each subsequent episode and season. Like Apple TV’s other sci-fi hits, Severance and Foundation, the futuristic show doesn’t expose the size of its world at first, gradually introducing more characters played by an ensemble cast including Common, Tim Robbins, Ashley Zukerman, Avi Nash, Chinaza Uche, and Jessica Henwick.

Since the first season of the series shared Lost’s unique ability to blend sci-fi mystery storytelling with elements of character drama and romance, viewers could reasonably have expected that the ambitious show’s story would collapse under the weight of its own ambition soon enough. However, three seasons in, the mystery box approach is only working better and better for Silo’s creators.

Silo Is Part of A Mystery Box Revolution On TV

While season 2 earned a superb 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, an improvement on season 1’s already-great 88%, Silo season 3 outdid both of these with the show’s first perfect 100% rating. This goes to show that, far from promising more than it can deliver, the sci-fi series is clearly perfectly utilizing the mystery box storytelling method to the shared delight of viewers and critics.

While this is an impressive achievement on the part of the show’s creators and a good reason for new viewers to seek out Silo, it is also part of a broader trend in recent genre TV. Both Yellowjackets and Severance seemed like they would risk running out of audience goodwill as the shows withheld their big reveals for a long time, only to win over reviewers with increasingly impressive later seasons that paid off their early mysteries handsomely.

While the ending of Stranger Things proved the mystery box approach doesn’t always work, the success of these titles is nonetheless heartening. Years after Lost pioneered the writing style, Silo and Fallout are fulfilling the potential of the mystery box approach.